Posts by rhydy

Re: Boyle's Law

Genuinely good question, simple answer: the heat from compression results in hot compression apparatus, hot tank and hot tank contents. Then all that heat is dissipated ambiently and lost quite quickly (insulating the tank to keep them warm merely slows that loss). The reverse happens when you release the gas, it comes out very cold as it expands.

Methane is a fossil fuel. So if this about avoiding oil imports rather than combatting climate change then better to simply run your engine on Hydrogen like BMW did over a decade ago, than "green washing" natural gas (the other name for methane).

true, first hand

User (at insurance brand you know well) asks: hello, how do I get past the wall? Sorry, what wall? I've come in to work and the computer I'm at has a brick wall, how do I get past the brick wall? I start wondering if the user is playing a platform game and wonder if a mushroom princess or giant rabbit might need to be defeated. After trying to get any further useful info, and failing to get any dialogue beyond "get me past the brick wall" I make the trip to desk side. Bingo! Remember how windows 3 had a program manager that could be minimised....and one of the wallpaper options was brick? Yep, solution, press return....or space....or use the mouse to open the ONLY ICON on the screen.

Statutory rights

In many countries consumer law would overrule any policy on refunds. In the UK I am confident that statutory rights would apply in a case where a device had a faulty sleep function. In which case the retailer would get one chance to remedy the situation (replacement) then if it still isn't working as it should a full refund would be expected. I think we have 12 months.

Hopefully your refund would include office and then you could use libre office and save hundreds.

Comms theory - Stereo

I've been converting my music to MP3 since before the ipod, and was studying communications theory at that time. I have had some pretty good setups to listen on. Even on the most low quality equipment I found 128k noticably poor. For background music it is ok but not for actively listening to. I have found VBR to be the best compromise, as some parts of a track have less treble detail (where disk space can be saved), and some parts of a track have loads of treble detail competing with each other. Will I re-rip my music to FLAC?..maybe some of the well-mastered good quality albums. However I also have some albums in DTS surround format, and for me that is the future..not stereo. Each speaker with a channel, with an appropriate bit rate for that channel. The sub would need the least, the mid-ranges would only need to deal with the mid-range frequencies so there would be less interference and harmonics to worry about, and the tweeters would be where the directional information comes from, and again, mastered so that they only get the info they need. I am not suggesting dropping higher frequencies at the mastering stage on an instrument by instrument level, but having a fully integrated mastering model where the input was all original sources, and the output was 7.1 surround with each of the 7 channels intended for a speaker with certain characteristics. No point in the sub in my car getting anything above, say 300Hz, and no need for my tweeters to have to worry about anything below say 1KHz? If the tweeters then only got the info they needed, then VBR could allow for big savings despite keeping the resolution for higher frequencies high because higher frequency detail isn't needed 100% of the time, but when it is needed it is important.

simples

get a folder for the discs, and send the cases off for recycling. Thats what i did......before i finally got around to finishing the big rip. Which started back with l3enc batch files in the mid nineties

Kessel

As a kid I also knew Parsec was distance, and so assumed that it must be a measure of acceleration rather than speed. In the same way that high performance car has a great "quarter mile". So if you assume that the Kessel run means a "jack-rabbit" standing start acceleration to light speed (or to light speed and back to sub-light speed again) then the Kessel run would be measured in Parsecs. There are reasons why a "run" might not be a simple distance covered.

sideways slide

You sound very enthuastic. I have done nothing but It quals since graduating 15 years ago (ok a brief break doing OU). My advice...similar to the others, forget about competing with the third world and automated tools, build your career in the medical industry and find rare/niche area where you can channel all that enthusiasm for tech into some new amd exciting field. Write software drivers for medical stuff, become a whizz in excel for medical computations, build cheap commodity medical devices from old PC bits, but do not undersell yourself as an IT support chap, no offence to IT support chaps...but their under loved by the finance department and staying that way.

farts

windoze

how do you tell the difference between a m$ status screen that has no new info, and a m$ status screen that locked up and froze 4 minutes ago? I blackberry already has a solution for this with a display that I can read when it is face down or in my pocket..a little red LED for message status.

unfair

This is pretty unfair of M$ because in one of the early expo demonstrations of windows7, where the touch screen was being demonstrated, the M$ representative was talking about the similarities with "another company, whose logo is a fruit". I doubt they have told anyone to avoid the comparisons with apple. After all, that would be completely fruitless ;)

Bob H

Do it

I have moved over to this, because my old machine was struggling with windows7. It had made a massive difference to speed, and the cloning software is excellent. I just wish Kingston would release a firmware with trim support. My drive isn't very full, and not used that much for music and movies, but at sometime, I may start to get that slowdown that you get from not having trim support and having to wait for erases when writing to disk.

Kingston emailed me back yesterday to say:

Kingston is working on implementing TRIMM supporting features into our SSD. However it is not decided yet as to when will it happen and what form this will have.

Please follow our website for most up to date information.

I am living in hope of a firmware upgrade, but this doesn't inspire me with more confidence.

OGOD

"if you drew a venn diagram of those two groups you would find maybe one person who belongs to both."

Agree, totally different demographics, however that still leaves a huge group of people who will want the mouse to maximise the opporutnities of evangelising to people nearby about how much more productive they are with open source software, and another even bigger group who want to be able to select "attack opponent with turnip enema" and "jump while looking left" and reloading weapon at the same time without needing to take the hand off the mouse. In which case it could sell in some numbers, even if it does look like the lvoe child of a scroll mouse and a ZX80.

What a coincidence

We are currently drafting some logos for a foreign bank in a very conservative country. The United Commerce Organisation Conglomerate. They very much like a logo with a banana and two kiwi fruit, but thankfully we have managed to talk them out of the dotted line at the top...LOL

Serious threat

For a government to ignore scientists, is business as usual, but for them to try and censor and influence them is seriously worrying. Ignorance is one thing, we are used to it in politicians, but telling scientists they will get fired for drawing correct conclusions that don't toe the party line....this is really bad. Next they'll be telling the media what to do, then we're next.

Note to politicians, if you don't like a scientific finding, ignore it, gloss over it, deny it and use your politicial skills to convince us that scientists are stupid, but don't fire scientists for doing good science.

BTW I have no personal agenda here, I would fight for my right to drink beer with mates, but all other drugs, not a fan. Sugar, caffeine and booze, fine, but synthetic, mind altering medication that encourages young people to medicate themselves into a good time....

I know where America is

When someone refers to "America", as people in the UK often do, I always know it is a short way of saying "United States of America". As Mike Jennings says it is the same as saying "Britian" instead of "the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland".

When we talk about the whole continent we say "the Americas". No one is sidelining Canada, or Latin America or Puerto Rico for that matter.

What's the difference here folks, you're all Welsh. America comes from the Welsh name Ap Meric via a merchant from Bristol called Amerike.

Britian was originally full of Welsh (celtic) so that's what you should really be getting hot under the collar about ;)

me so stupid

humans

ok so maybe humans are unfortunatelya must, in order to seel a film to humans (who aren't geeks like us). This is easy enough. The film show the predators engineering the aliens. They are intended for use only on predators who can host them, and birth them without being permantly harmed (as that is how they themselves reproduce). The idea is that you hunt your own alien. Then they have a little fun messing around with other species, and discover that human derived aliens are bad arse! They find it fun to let the humans come to them, so they orchestrate that. How come ripley was the first? As already mentioned, almost none of them survive, and any comms are intercepted by the evil corporation. Who then decide to keep it quiet and "accidentally" send one of thier mining vessels to intercept, having somehow sabotaged the transport ship containing the eggs so that the giant piloting it gets gob raped (before or during flight).

a little context please

I always enjoy your irreverent observations, however on this occasion I think you have gone a little `daily mail' on us, and failed to report that this comment was in the context of policians as twitterers. The questions he was answering was about his own lack of tweetage, and he said "the thing about politicians is that we do have to think about what we say...". I think it would have been more `El Reg' to pick up on the fact that he was merely saying that he was worried that too many twits could make HIM a twat. Ironically in saying so, it has been picked up the media as a way to make people believe that he is a twat. Ah well, at least there was an IT angle because I am sure that digital mixing system that recorded that interview was running embedded linux ;)

Cardiff

My Uni, Cardiff, did a similar thing back in the days I was a student. They paid a firm over a £100K to come up with the revelation of ditching the historic cardiff University crest, for a red box containing the two words "Cardiff" and "University", presumably in a special font, presumably very exclusive.

SSDs

SSDs should reverse this trend, hopefully before Christmas. I think the performance gains are massive for running a system drive on an SSD. Combine that with an M$ OS that lives up to the hype, and I think a lot of people will be thinking that it is a good time for a refresh of laptop and desktop, I certainly do. Once SSDs come down in price I think this will have a big impact on the market, the performance and capacities are already there, just the scale of production that is needed now. I have already upgraded my 2003 PATA desktop to a new one in readiness for an SSD system drive >128G, probably a RAID, with everything else (media, archives) on a good old spinner with a Terabyte or so? The laptop will follow once big SSDs are established for nOtEbooks.